Had a very good day "gulling" on the Portland waterfront with Denny Abbott today, with the key target being the Thayer's seen there recently by Bill Bunn, Noah Gibb, and likely others. Started at 9:45 at the Maine Fish Pier. Over the next 90 minutes we did not have a Thayer's, but we had at least 5 Icelands (3 1st year, 2 adult) and 2 Glaucous (1 1st yr, 1 adult). There were often a few gulls in the air but no big numbers.
At 11:30 we went to Mill Creek in South Portland which is on the east side of the Hannaford's (address is 50 Cottage Road). This is where we hit gull paydirt staying there till 1:30. We never had more than 100 gulls there, but always had a high number of Icelands (up to 9 at a time) and Glaucous (3 at a time). Gulls were constantly coming and going so not sure how many white-winged gulls were there over that time. At about 12:45 I spotted the Thayer's Gull that Bill and Noah had found there. Mantle is quite pale - either washed out or molting into 2nd year plumage, with dark tail band, wing tips, and secondaries. Phonescoped pictures on Flickr include -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/84823168@N07/12312728453/ Spread wings - great view of the primaries and secondaries
http://www.flickr.com/photos/84823168@N07/12312676203/ Perched on ice
(there are Icelands and/or Glaucous in each picture as well)
We also had another gull that may well have been a second Thayer's. We had very close scope views of the bird as it preened showing very dark tail, secondaries, and mantle, with heavy mottling of the mantle feathers. Wing tips were also very dark, typical of a darker Thayer's. But since the mantle was so dark the wing tips were as dark as the mantle. With wings spread we saw that the outer 5 primaries had darker outer half and paler inner half, and the inner primaries were paler overall. I only got distant, less than exciting, photos of the bird after it flew off -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/84823168@N07/12312517925/ if you enlarge this one the dark secondaries are visible
http://www.flickr.com/photos/84823168@N07/12312517805/ second picture
In both of these pictures the wingtips look paler than the mantle, but what appears to be the paler wingtips are actually the inner primaries - looking at this bird through a scope showed that the outer/darker primaries are drooping lower and are barely visible. Like I said the photos aren't the best, so likely not good enough to identify this one. But the secondaries and tail were darker than the bird described above.
Mike Resch
Pepperell, MA
-- Maine birds mailing list
maine-birds@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/maine-birds
https://sites.google.com/site/birding207
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Maine birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to maine-birds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment